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Another stage of development down for the babies. Both of the big chilli plants had their first flowers open today. I suspect that the blooms still have a fair bit of expanding to do until they reach their full size, but exciting none the less. And it looks like there are many, many, many more getting ready to appear too. Far too many for me to be bothered to count at this stage! Yum, yum!

I was reading today that chilli flowers come out in a bit of a pattern/progession. One opens, then 2, then 4 etc until presumably some limit is reached. I’ll be interested to see if that’s actually true.

Now I just have to work out how/when to pollinate them by either giving the plant a good shake or rubbing the inside of the flowers gently with something. Gulp!

It finally happened! A sunny, warm, relatively windless day. And on a weekend day too! Yippee! Summer might have arrived at last. Which, considering it’s really only the first week of official summer time isn’t too bad!

So we had to make the most of it. A big walk (ok, so it wasn’t that big) around our local area, looking at all the pretty flowers that have sprung up. We followed that up with a BBQ in the local park. Vege sausages (hmm) and baby squid stuffed with feta and chorizo for me, and feta and peppers for Bec. Very posh!

Only thing that would have made it better would have been to get rid of the 14 yr olds drinking their alcopops nearby…

Well, looks like I can remember enough stats from a book to be considered for UK citizenship. 

Before you can put forward your full application for naturalisation here you have to do a short multi choice computer based test covering things that are really useful for living in the UK. Like knowing who it is that opens Parliament every year, how many people live in London, how much lower average women’s pay is, and where the most immigants to the UK have come from, etc, etc, etc.

All really essential stuff for life here!

But at least I remembered enough to reach the 75% pass mark out of 24ish questions, but they don’t tell you what your mark is, or what you got wrong, so I might still be misguided on a few things.

Now just to deal with the Home Office here for the rest of the process.  If anyone there is actaully doing this kind of work, and not out firefighting on all the other Home Office issues that have blown up in the papers lately.

Expect an update in 5.14 months, going by the average application times on the site!

Yippee! Look what arrived for me today! A whole heap of electronic bits and pieces to play with from Digikey. I love the Digikey catalogue. I don’t understand what half the bits are, but it’s still fun to pour through the 1200 or so pages.

Now I just have to work out what to do with it all, and how they all can work together to do interesting things. Like flash a light, and tell me what the temperature is and vital things like that. But it’s going to be a fun winter! Just have to wait for summer to finish first, I guess. Unless we’ve already had it, that is.

A night at the opera?! No thanks, I’ll take a night at a David Gilmour concert at the Royal Albert Hall over large lasses in viking helmets any time! And thanks to Bec winning the work tickets, we managed to have a perfect view from one of the boxes as well.

Absolutely cracking night. Superb music, songs, sound and lights (even the obligatory laser). And the special guests were a bonus… Rick Wright, Crosby, Nash, and err… Bowie!

After having been to see a couple of gigs at the Royal Albert Hall, it’s so hard to go drag myself to any other venue for a concert now. It’s just such a nice, cosy venue for the size.

Today was the first day that I tried out my Egyptian Turkish coffee maker thingee. Yum, yum! All a bit involved, but with the help of the guide from here, it all went relatively smoothly. But yes, I did make a bit of a mess….

When I was doing the daily check on the chilli plants on Friday, I noticed something new appearing at the top of them. I suspect that this has to be the start of the flowers! Yippee! And best of all, it looks like there are quite a number of them starting to sprout. Now all I have to do is to work out exactly when to try to pollenate them. Hmmm.

Another thing that I’ve learnt about chilli plants is that they like doing pushups. Well, one pushup a day really. Either that or they go to sleep. Their leaves all sag and droop down sometime during the early evening, and by morning they are all back up spread wide. I’m not sure what time in the morning, but it must be early. It’s so noticable that even Bec worked it out!

Another day where we thought we’d go see a bit of London history.

The Brunel Engine House is just a few blocks from us, so on another cold wet Saturday, it seemed like a good idea to go visit. We’ve walked past it so many times saying “we should go there one day” so it was about time we did!

I think the word for it is quaint? Our lounge is about the same size as the museum (oh alright, it’s a tiny bit bigger than our lounge), but at ony a couple of quid, who cares. Some interesting stuff about the Thames tunnels and things. All interesting enough for us to buy a little book to read while we were sitting in the nearby pub afterwards.

Yes, though it’s taken a while, the sorting of the photos of the trip is finally finished and they are up at the usual place (if you don’t know, or can’t remember, where that is, send me an email…) Well, I say finished, but we haven’t bothered yet to do any cropping, straightning or touchups yet, but I’m sure you’ll cope….

We’ve even put together a guide which is here to tell you what we did and what you’re looking at. It might be worth keeping a copy of that page open and handy while you’re going through them. Just note, if you’re the first to look at a photo it might take a while to open as the poor liitle underpowered server here tries to resize it so you can see it…. You can either just wait for them, or come back later when we will have hopefully have gone through them all and it should be faster.

Anyway, enjoy! And we have lots more if you really need to be bored! Let us know if there are any you really like too, just so we know which are the really good ones.

After our wander around the chaotic Cairo museum, we were told that the British Museum here in London had Egyptian display that was much more clearly labelled and organised.

So as we had a Sunday with nothing planned, we thought we’d go have a look. And they were right!

It was interesting to wander round there having seen all the stuff in Egypt. We’d point items out going “we went there” or ” that looks like the ones at Karnak, and sometimes we’d even be right. Some of the other displays such as the Egyptian burial ritual displays were put together with a whole heap of information alongside and really told the story well.

While there certainly a lot in the Cairo museum, the sheer volume of it all, and the way that very few items were labeled, made it all a bit overwhelming and almost disinteresting. That said, there were some areas there that had obviously had a lot of work put in to them, and were a joy to walk through, like the Tutenkhamon display.

We also had a wander through some other bits of the British museum, but after about 2 hours we’d had about enough, especially as we kept getting lost due to some of the linking galleries being closed, and so we decided we’d have to go back and finish wandering around some other time.

But at least we’ve had a recent dose of London culture!